There, on the side
towards the right, where the water flowed in, Malipieri had found a
narrow slit, barely wide enough to admit a man's open hand and wrist,
but nearly five feet high, evidently a passage intended for letting
the water flow into the interior of the construction when it
overflowed its channel and rose above the floor of the chamber.
At first Malipieri had supposed that this aperture communicated with
some ancient and long-forgotten drain by which the water could escape
to the Tiber; it was not until he had gained an entrance to the hollow
mass of masonry that he understood the hideous use to which it had
been applied.
It had not been hard to enlarge it. Any one who has worked among ruins
in Italy could tell, even blindfold, the difference between the work
done in ancient times and that of the middle ages. Roman brickwork is
quite as compact as solid sandstone, but mediaeval masonry was almost
invariably built in a hurry by bad workmen, of all sorts of fragments
embedded in poorly mingled cement, and it breaks up with tolerable
ease under a heavy pickaxe.
In half a day Malipieri and Masin had widened the slit to a convenient
passage, but as soon as it had been possible to squeeze through, the
architect had gone in. He never forgot what he felt when he first
looked about him.
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